>There was an incident once where a primitive ai system misidentified some birds as a nuclear launch. A submarine captain was supposed to launch missiles vs the

>There was an incident once where a primitive ai system misidentified some birds as a nuclear launch. A submarine captain was supposed to launch missiles vs the United States, which would have ended the entire world. He decided not to. I think you mixed up a couple of stories. There was an incident in 1983 where the Soviet early warning system picked up a reflection off a satellite and high-altitude clouds and interpreted it as a launch of 5 US ICBMs. The "proper" reaction to detecting a US launch would be to counterstrike immediately, but the operator Stanislav Petrov has recognized it as an error - he correctly guessed that if push came to shove, Americans would launch a couple more missiles than just 5. The submarine incident was in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. As it was ending, a US destroyer dropped a couple of small signalling depth charges above a Soviet submarine. The submarine did not have ballistic missiles, but it had torpedoes with nuclear warheads. Those weapons required usually permission from both the captain and the political officer - and both agreed that World War 3 has just started and they should engage. Thankfully, the commander of the submarine flotilla Vasily Arkhipov was aboard and in this case also his permission was needed. He instead opted to surface the ship and contact Moscow for orders. There was no AI present during any of this. I don't believe birds possess the required characteristics to be identified as an ICBM launch.